Cerastes wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2020 2:41 pm
Did you actually go to monastery or did you just plan to go there?
I‘m asking because it is hard for me to imagine that a young man would want to go to monastery by own will. I often had discussions about this with my grandma who wanted me to go there at least for a few months of silent retreat.
I wanted to go there by my own will. How exactly one sees monastery might mean different things to different people, but I had to consider it seriously, because it seemed almost an only option of dedicating my life totally to spirituality in a way that our society would somehow understand.
It was already been a fact for me for many years that nothing else interested me in life but its spiritual depth: everything else was only tools or obstacles for that single aim. I have never truly "belonged" to our quite Protestant Finnish society with its strong emphasis on the idealism of work and almost zero possibilities to actually attend to societal life in a religious way, if you are not part of the Protestant clergy. It would be a great blessing to somehow remove that extreme pressure of the daily struggle between the inner (heart-felt and actual) and the outer (societal and artificial) worlds and give the message to the societal structures: "I have this place, see, I am doing something that you can call by a name and be done with it".
And since this is the most important point, I was for a long time very seriously considering making the extreme compromises of:
1) Joining to the religion which I do not fully support in a theological sense (Orthodox Christianity) but whose doctrines I would have been able to interpret in my mind as symbolically valid.
2) Deliberately putting myself in the system which works by removing one's personal will in order to transform it into a form that is thought to be more suitable to God. (I read a lot about Orthodox monastic practices at that time, and it puts a great stress on this liberating one of his apparently evil ego.)
3) Trying the institutionalized version of killing out my sexuality, even though it showed no sign of lessening by any personal efforts. This I thought (and still think) might have ended up in a serious disaster.
So I chose to not try this way, but it was very tempting for a long time. I have never looked back though, but think that I made a good choice not trying out monastic life. Come to think of it, my world view's collapse (or was it elation?) to Satanism happened quite soon, and had I been inside the walls of monastery at that time, something extremely nasty might have born from such a disaster. I'm thinking something on the line of the Name of the Rose kind of freaking out.